Human Retina Based Identification System Using Gabor Filters and GDA Technique

A biometric authentication system provides an automatic person authentication based on some characteristic features possessed by the individual. Among all other biometrics, human retina is a secure and reliable source of person recognition as it is unique, universal, lies at the back of the eyeball and hence it is unforgeable. The process of authentication mainly includes pre-processing, feature extraction and then features matching and classification. Also authentication systems are mainly appointed in verification and identification mode according to the specific application. In this paper, preprocessing and image enhancement stages involve several steps to highlight interesting features in retinal images. The feature extraction stage is accomplished using a bank of Gabor filter with number of orientations and scales. Generalized Discriminant Analysis (GDA) technique has been used to reduce the size of feature vectors and enhance the performance of proposed algorithm. Finally, classification is accomplished using k-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier to determine the identity of the genuine user or reject the forged one as the proposed method operates in identification mode. The main contribution in this paper is using Generalized Discriminant Analysis (GDA) technique to address ‘curse of dimensionality’ problem. GDA is a novel method used in the area of retina recognition.